Motivation can be difficult for both children and adults and many methods have been used in an attempt to increase motivation. In children the lack of motivation is generally focused around the areas of behavior and education.
Motivating a child to exhibit good behavior is a challenge faced by every parent. Parents often resort to punishment for bad behavior as a means for motivating good behavior. However, child development specialists generally agree that negative rewards for bad behavior are not as effective as positive rewards for good behavior.
In an attempt to increase reward motivation in education, computer programs and freestanding machines have been developed. Most of these, as used in education to motivate student learning, reward the student for correct answers using only intangible rewards.
A diversity of educationally oriented commercial copyright software, shareware software, and public domain software exists and can be found in the homes of most owners of personal computers. These educational programs quiz students with questions on a variety of subjects including spelling, language, math, and other subjects. A large percentage of the educational software includes graphic effects, tallying of scores, printed readouts, and special audio effects to reward students upon successful completion of the problem and motivate continued utilization of the software. However, students frequently become less and less motivated by these pseudo-rewards due to their intangible and repetitive nature. In fact, many students tend to stop using the educational software programs altogether.
One issue with computer games, marbles in the jar, and other reward systems on the market is the lack of reward tangibility. Especially for children, the promise of a reward they cannot see or touch makes it difficult to focus on the objective and be motivated to continue the positive behavior.
Other examples of reward systems would be Use Your Marbles, Smilemiles.com and sticker charts. Use Your Marbles is a very simple reward system with the reward written on a board instead of being in an enclosure or having a picture of the reward. It consists of a jar of marbles and two shot glass size glasses which hold 4 marbles per day. The kids lose their marbles for bad behavior during the day. The marbles remaining at the end of the day go into the big jar. After the marbles reach the reward line, they get the reward. This system does not have the visual stimulation or the usefulness of the disclosed system and it is doubtful that anyone would use this system other than for young children. Online reward systems such as Smilemiles.com require a computer and do not provide the tangible reward as with the disclosed system.
Entry of data may also be delayed if the computer is in use or otherwise inaccessible. Sticker charts can be fun for younger children however as the children get older there is little appeal to getting a star on a chart. Further, not many adults would consider using sticker charts for themselves. Even small children become bored quickly and lose interest in sticker charts.